Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing

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Musk sinks Twitter in just a year (This week in books)

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This week! Books!

I’ll never forget it. When I was on vacation in Hawaii in the late 2000s, I checked my email and it was nothing but “new follower” notifications from Twitter. Sandwiched in between hundreds of these alerts was a congratulations. I’d made Twitter’s inaugural “Who to follow” list. Everyone from Mike Tyson to Margaret Atwood to Mark Cuban started following me. Twitter launched a new career for me in social media, which eventually led to product and program management.

In October 2022, Elon Musk famously walked into Twitter HQ in San Francisco holding a sink solely to make a dumb pun about letting it “sink in” that he now owned Twitter. In those early days, while I was certainly no Elon fanboy, I was optimistic that expanding verification might solve some of the issues on the platform. At the very least, I reasoned, Musk wants to make money, right? He wouldn’t really light $44 billion on fire, right?

Well. That ended up being one of my worst predictions of all time. Just read Casey Newton, who has essentially already written Twitter’s obituary. I never imagined Musk completely dismantling verification as we knew it and creating instead an incentive structure to spread misinformation. (I imagined something more like the way Meta implemented it). I misread his motives and actually don’t think he minds lighting $44 billion on fire if it means he gets to spread conspiracy theories and be the top edgelord on what’s left of Twitter.

Now? I’ve abandoned Twitter, which has become more or less an unusable cesspool. Please please please follow me instead on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and/or Bluesky.

Twitter is toast. RIP.

Renowned cultural institution 92NY (better known as the 92nd Y or just the Y) made the pretty distressing-to-say-the-least decision to “postpone” a talk Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen was scheduled to give with Min Jin Lee due to critical comments Nguyen has made about Israel. The event moved to McNally Jackson’s instead, and the leader of 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center called 92NY’s decision “unacceptable.” After multiple resignations at 92NY and several authors pulling out of events, 92NY announced that it was suspending its literary series.

Meanwhile, Scholastic backtracked on its segregated book fairs, releasing a statement apologizing for the decision. After some authors noted that Scholastic’s statement did not clarify whether the titles would be reintegrated, Scholastic released a second second statement that said they were “working to find a better way” without really clarifying what that means. Keep an eye on this one.

In happier news, congrats to the Hugo Award winners! Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher won for best novel.

With a newsletter headline like “The most interesting statistic in publishing” one had better deliver, and Ken Whyte did just that. He notes the decline in fiction sales at Penguin Random House (genre fiction in particular) and ties it to the rise of self-publishing on Amazon. Sales on Amazon are a notorious black box, but Whyte makes a persuasive case.

I hadn’t even realized that Calvin & Hobbes artist Bill Watterson had a book coming out this month with illustrator John Kascht, but I really enjoyed Rivka Galchen’s review and reappraisal of his past work. I really enjoyed The Mysteries too.

And in writing advice news, Anne R. Allen writes that NaNoWriMo could help you get over your “creativity wound,” and I really liked this post by Sara Zarr about all the things that go into writing a novel that don’t end up on the page. Not everything you do for research must be woven in! It’s there between the lines!

This week in bestsellers

Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories. (All links are affiliate links):

Adult print and e-book fiction:

  1. The Exchange by John Grisham
  2. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
  3. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Gamus
  4. Two Twisted Crowns by Rachel Gillig
  5. Wildfire by Hannah Grace

Adult print and e-book nonfiction:

  1. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
  2. Prequel by Rachel Maddow
  3. Enough by Cassidy Hutchinson
  4. Worthy by Jada Pinckett Smith
  5. Behind the Seams by Dolly Parton

Young adult hardcover:

  1. Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross
  2. Curious Tides by Pascale Lacelle
  3. A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid
  4. This Winter by Alice Oseman
  5. Long Live the Pumpkin Queen by Shea Ernshaw

Middle grade hardcover:

  1. Wings of Fire: A Guide to the Dragon World by Tui T. Sutherland
  2. The Official Harry Potter Cookbook by Joanna Farrow
  3. The Harry Potter Wizarding Almanac by J.K. Rowling
  4. Wonder by R.J. Palacio
  5. The Sun and the Star by Rick Riordan and Mark Oshiro

This week on the blog

In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:

Don’t forget that you can nominate your first page and query for a free critique on the blog:

And keep up with the discussion in all the places!

And finally, watching a statue of Robert E. Lee getting melted down was the most satisfying thing I saw during a very distressing week of news. And wouldn’t you know, Elon Musk saw this too and celebrated his Twitter anniversary by sinking to a new low. See what I did there. Get it. Sink. It’s a sink pun.

Have a great weekend!

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Photo: The Huntington, San Marino, CA. Follow me on Instagram!

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Neil Larkins says

    I’m more than happy for your presence on Facebook. I’ve had a Twitter (X?) account for over ten years and never used it once. Never appealed to me, but I have no problem with those who like it.
    Musk is maddening. Not that I care that much about X but come on! What a colossal waste of money. He indeed should have just burned it and grilled steaks for the hungry while he was at it. At the least a billion starving people could have been fed for a couple weeks.
    Or is it a gargantuan ego?

  3. Yvonne T Osborne says

    I completely agree. Musk has shown he’s better at tearing things down then building them up. I was never much for Twitter and would shun it now. Seriously you go from a fun name like that to X??? This man is evil.

  4. George Miller Jr says

    Only people who would like unfettered free speech that leans left and censorship of anything that doesn’t and rocks their worldview would say X is a cesspool. Personally, I’ve always though X was a cesspool from the beginning with the way they would ban/censor speech over someone’s feelings being hurt or going against the “accepted” viewpoint, and it got much, much worse during the 2020 election season (did anyone here not bother to read the “Twitter Files” saga?) and it’s much, much worse overseas with governments prosecuting people for voicing an unacceptable opinion on X

    I think X still has some growing pains left, as he’s trying to make a private company profitable.

  5. Ryan Wyler says

    Nathan

    Only just found your post sir!

    Fascinating article, because I thought Musk was going to sink Twitter too – just as you say. But I don’t think it is happening. I live in the South Pacific, and at this distance it’s like looking at US politics through the wrong end of a telescope. i.e. Only the largest objects are visible. What I notice is that the flood of loud pronouncements of the “death of X” turn out to be almost exclusively by those of a left wing persuasion, who want it to fail since it is no longer their exclusive domain.

    I have no love for the right or the left, but know for sure after 15 years on Twitter, have observed that until about 6 years ago, posts were equally balanced, left / right i.e. ‘down the middle’, making for extremely interesting debate. But since then right wing voices were slowly but surely suppressed. It’s been proven by the opening of records, and is no longer even denied. This included in particular the shutting down of clown-in-chief Donald Trump. As a result I think the left side began to view the entirely left-leaning remnants of Twitter as the ‘center’. So when Musk pulled it back to the middle again, allowing both sides to speak again, it appeared to be ‘far right’ the left.

    Now, I truly do not know which side holds the moral truth, but basically my external observation is that everything in the US that used to be based on business objectives has become politicized, so the “death of X” isn’t based on objective reality, but more of a hope. However, it doesn’t seem to be working: Activity I observe every day on X isn’t decreasing, but growing. It may be the cult of personality, because unlike any other platform, the ‘leader’, Musk, posts everyday. This attracts extremes of reaction, and draws a huge amount of attention, mostly from detractors who are too slow to realize they are providing the best possible form of free publicity. Many have trumpeted their departure from X, but mysteriously keep reappearing and posting.

    In my case, over the years, I have relentlessly weeded out anything remotely political on my account and only interact with other authors, illustrators and publishers. But I do observe the public timeline, and I’m genuinely intrigued to see what will happen on X during the upcoming US election. I’ll keep looking through the telescope.

    Keep writing Nathan – you are always a lighthouse.

    Ryan